The real stories from inside the F1 paddock

The Red Bull floor

The Red Bull has not been declared illegal. The FIA Technical department has said that in its opinion the floor does not meet the rules as it interprets them. If red Bull wishes to go on using the floor they can. They would then be reported to the FIA Stewards, who would rule on whether the opinion of the FIA Technical department was correct or not. If Red Bull did not agree with that, it could appeal to the FIA International Court of Appeal.

However, Red Bull will probably decided that it is best not to go down this path. This is an alternative way of solving problems to having protests and it is much more sensible than having the result of events left hanging in the air.

Share this:

Related

53 Responses

Joe, can you elaborate on what the difference is between the Red Bull floor and the Sauber (and as I understand it, Ferrari) floor? Looking here:http://www.formula1.com/news/technical/2012/869/967.html
it would appear that if the Sauber/Ferrari floor is legal, then Red Bulls should be as well.

Also, Gary Anderson did a layman’s critique on the Beeb, which sold me the objection. His stinging point was telling this interpretation problem has a long history. Was on the iplayer thing for their “forum”. Well, I thought it very simply put.

Even better than that was Eddie Jordan in the same discussion giving us his only valuable insight ever… when he was a team boss a discussion with Charlie Whiting might result in a decision where CW accepts it, unless another team protests, then he’d have to look at it again…

The F1 Forum on BBC iPlayer / Red Button, besides the race itself (although even that’s debatable) is the best part of their show.

Goodness, you have to be quick off the mark on this blog – see my comment below. I agree, Gary Anderson’s remarks were, I thought, crystal clear. I disagree with Joe on this point – there’s far too much ‘open’ discussion in the press before a ruling is made, because the FIA are so woolly handling these matters. You can’t please everyone so come out and decide – job done, next please.

I’m sorry, but this is a completely daft way of doing business. Gary Anderson summed of the situation very well last weekend on the BBC, in very simple terms, and it was clear that the Red Bull floor didn’t comply. The FIA always seem to make it more complicated than it need be. They are to ruling body – either it’s correct or not, so why spend this amount of time sorting it out and why would the stewards take precedence over the FIA Technical Department?

It shouldn’t have got this far in the first place – time for a better interface between the teams and the FIA to speed up the decision making process. Laughable really.

Morning Joe. Charlie is such a nice guy doing his job so well for so long….
BUT… this is nothing short of shambolic.
Joe do you reckon the teams that decided Not to protest have skeletons in their own cupboards, maybe even ones that Newey knows all about, and there’s a secret but uneasy pact between them? We stay shtum. You keep your wins. You say nothing yourself. No one’s any the wiser.

Everyone seems to be kicking and screaming about this being a shambles but surely the FIA producing a ruling after quiet discussion is much fairer and better for the sport than banning cars part way through a season. Banning the throttle maps (for half the field essentially) last year was a shambles – this is more how I’d expect the FIA to work. Don’t disrupt the racing results, make a clarification judgement and suggest everyone change tack before any big messy fights happen. Admittedly the big technical fights can be quite dramatic and sort of enjoyable for geeks like myself but I get the impression the less ‘enthusiastic’ fan base would enjoy the results on the track to stand.

No, it’s just pushing the written rules to the very edge.
Red Bull had the car cleared for all previous races so it was by definition legal because the FIA inspection said so. Now the FIA have changed their mind so for any future races it won’t be legal and must change.

Pushing rules to the edge is the only development area left in F1, no one is allowed to make a better engine or any radically different monocoque or suspension design.

As I heard it, the opposing teams had a word with Red Bull in the moments following the Monaco GP. The opposition agreed not to protest Red Bull’s race win and 37 point haul, while Red Bull agreed not to use the floor system going forward.

Which would make this FIA announcement a pro forma dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s.

It’s just the way the rules are written. Some parts are very heavy handed like the throttle mapping part, whilst there is a huge hole in the exhaust regs because of a few words in a phrase that can be read two ways.

rpaco, i read something lately that suggested to me that the throttle map to my mind was a wide open door. As in, article that said this was all mapped per corner. I just can’t remember the source. Read that when I was a bit emotional the other week. But unless I was dreaming, my eyes sprang out Tex Avery style at the time. Is this a simple thing of knowing how to map to gear throws, because you know what gear you should be in per corner? Basically, my takeaway from what I read was that, okay, standard ECUs and all, but hey we all mostly use Pentium based computers, and do what we like with them. Does any of what I am saying make sense?

Fun trivia, Intel hired a guy called Vladimir Pentkovsky, in ’91, whose forbear met a sticky end. I couldn’t find Pentkovsky’s page in the Intel site last I looked, at least 5 years ago. But it was widely rumored they named the chip after him.

I’m aware car companies do it (Peugeot especially), but RobbieMeister is correct, at least to the extent that that was the reason Intel publicly stated at the time.

The clonemakers such as AMD, Cyrix, etc. were using the same numbers and Intel (apparently) couldn’t stop them. Hence the shift to the “Pentium” name, which as was widely pointed out at the time, is somewhat of a hybrid affair, consisting as it does of a Greek prefix coupled to a Latin suffix.

As to WHY they couldn’t trademark a number of the form x86, I don’t know. Maybe was different back then and/or in the States? Or perhaps they were simply badly-advised.

Hi Ambient, I’ll go with the drift, but I am not trying to agree to differ, so much as I always have my ear attuned to those little stories which break the ice when approaching big, close to the chest companies. Having a imaginary secretive Russian ace designer is an amusing idea, good for head faking the competition. So, balance is, it was an in joke. A very good one, because so plausible. Just how many people read Russian science journals regularly back then? Then there’s the guy who invented stealth over there, to have it picked up by our mob . . always mix up your legends when selling a whopper!

There have always been odd exceptions to trademarks. Deutsche Telekom trademark protecting their rather lurid pink color is a good one. But that got by on the famous recognition rule. I need to brush up as to the protectability of names (my own company has a difficult one) but I think where x86 falls down is that it does not describe a whimsical or non functional aspect of the product, but rather “a machine of this type which performs that” which would make it unprotectable as descriptive.

Greek + Latin is a great way to concatenate. Novel, not descriptive, very protectable. A whimsy and invented name. That’s very strong logic to debunk my story. I just like stories. Sometimes jokes bubble up to the real world. I’d have to dig deep to unearth the memories (I fear many memos of amusement long lost) from the day my business partner said “We don’t trade ads, we sell souls.” He was a genuine scholar of the ancients. I had to stop him using hieroglyphics as logos. The company name derives from a response to that idea full on 180deg away. A little medicine makes econogeddon go down.

I distinctly recall, in the cold light of morn, the article said engine mapping was programmed _per _corner. Now, I can understand brake bias being on a dial. But hand on, there’s a awful lot you can get from having a engine that “knows” what you are going to do around a bend. Change the map, you get different torque curves e.g. to suit your exit. Even road cars are starting to do this or similar things, hooked up to GPS to pull the map*. Although anyone who can write tight code to a real time processing system (QNX is a broad favourite) is hardcore in my book, I dislike the idea of the standard ECU” being a sales fake.

*Mercedes is going silly far with that. But plug in some moisture sensors, adjust the traction control, and you could be saving lives. The things you have to do when normal people buy insanely fast motors . . .

my spies tell me that one of Schumacers all conquering Ferraris used GPS for all sorts of things including engine maps and diff settings. Not sure of the year but would probably be the most successful. I understand the rules were changed to prevent it, possibly the ban on pit to car telemetry. But my spies could be wrong.

First of all, certainly civilian GPS is really hopeless on its own for timing. No good without all sorts of motion sensors. You can’t get the resolution. Look at Cosworth’s website for parts lists, but there are many other suppliers. But in combination, timing gets really good. Now add in pitch yaw roll sensors, and start calculating the track camber and elevations. Pick up this data on test laps, start integrating it. (especially true when more testing was allowed, just look at the array of visible sensors on this year’s test mules) I think you could start being really accurate. Store all this in an ECU, and done. Or, today, you can obviously have manual input attuned to certain corners.

Obviously I’m just having a hack at wondering what is possible. A little thought play.

But if you thought of another thing, with pit to car telemetry, what about doing some photogrammetry from the onboard camera to feed back further position data?

. . .

However, I think a bigger divisor was at play, not so long ago.

Much of the wondrous tech we see now is commoditised. Want a supercomputer? About 2 grand an hour, courtesy Amazon ECS. No multimillion pound datacenter necessary. (depends on the job, but it’s an amazing development)

Take it back a mere 15 years, and anything truly cool was very hard to get. Or insanely expensive, or there were so few people with the skills.

We’ve been on a convergence with technology, especially computing, that has put affordable top kit in the hands of a new generation.

What I am saying is, whoever went hardcore for tech earlier on in F1 would have had a comparably much bigger advantage than today.

That’s almost an argument for opening it up again. It’s not a bad idea to market to the computer geek crowd.

And all said and done, MSC did just show us one awesome lap, under the new rules, so for all his bad luck, he still has it somewhere. For the first time since the late 90s, he’s been interesting.

One last thought. Imagine if all this is going on. Just how finely tuned it all is. Then you make one tiny wrong assumption about your tyres. Maybe it is not so much tyre variability as the sensitivity of other assumptions.

Okay guys, I never knew if I was not on the end of a insider’s joke on this, but bear with me. I do know the official line, and let’s just assume, well, let’s not. Andy Grove is one of the wiliest bosses ever to roam the planet. Hungarian dude, who learned 5 languages to hide out from the Nazis. ‘Twas he who was in charge. But anyhow, he surely appreciated a joke, so let’s expand:

If you remember the time, RISC was consider the speed daemon. Alpha was blowing everyone away, MIPS and Power following up, and Intel’s CISC (complex instruction set architecture, the other one means Reduced) was bogged down with too few registers (still the case) and needing to do several things per tick.

That meant that Intel was seriously behind on this funny game of clock speed, which was a huge marketing factor.

Not only that, but most mathematical functions reduce to fairly simple things, so run better if you pump them clean and simple and fast.

At the time, people who bought 20+ thousand pound workstations were not doing drudge office work. (that’s not terribly high end for the time). So psychologically, the market was led by a somewhat different breed of customer. (recall the internet in the 90’s? Looked a bit different, eh . .)

Anyhow, so Intel came up with this neat idea: “Hey guys, we can pump the speed with simpler instructions, so why don’t we decompile our big fuzzy messy ones into simpler things, and then we can bump the speed and gain some serious marketing edge?”

In other words, keep the same old same old at the outside (compatibility) just steal all the good ideas for pushing it even further in. This, incidentally, is what pushed transistor counts, and the current programme of replacing 10 Billion Dollar chip fabs on a 4 year cycle.

Only problem, all of the INtel code assumed a register starved environment. Registers give you flexibility. So, in essence, you are not going to quickly do any transformation just like that, the very code is going to be unaware and unable to take advantage of any new hardware you throw at it. Therefore very smart things had to be done.

All I know, if that Pentkovsky was hired into this frenzy, has some serious background, is one of those names that used to be whispered, and well, they sure delivered. The full microarchitecture story is much longer.

If this was a inside joke, it had all the right elements. In fact, romance. Pentkovsky studied at one of the best maths universities in the world, his father was a dissident killed by Stalin, and he was snatched in a hiring frenzy as the Soviet Union fell. Spirited away. At the same time, SUN Microsystems was doing the same thing with cryptographers. The Valley sure knows how to sell a story, which may not always be straight commerce.

It could have just been a rumor spread by colleagues basically trying to high five him. (Har, har!) I don’t really recall when I first heard his name, but he sure once had a very laudatory page on Intel’s website (which I mirrored so will be on tape somewhere, assuming that has not flaked) and I used to read some very heavy stuff indeed.

I would love to recap the advertising history and spin around this wider subject, but maybe another day. It was a very classy combination of engineering and marketing. Okay, except the men in silly suits not too fashion distant from McLaren’s silvery pit crew boys of one time.

Not getting uppity here, but I can tell you how one of the fastest exchanges basically keeps all their trades inside the processor for distinct and novel advantage, and I do simply have only one ambition: make all the print ads trade so guys can write magazines and stop worrying about jerk off salesmen like me! I plan for my temporal redundancy 🙂

So, take it as you will. There was this guy. He was by all accounts instrumental.

You are also forgetting the marketing transition from the codename 2/3/4-86 to a actual name. I believe there is more than a little coincidence!

With two exceptions, most of Soviet computing efforts were directed at reverse engineering US designs. This is easy to look up on the ‘net. (and rather fun)

Now, what INtel had to do, was reverse their own chip, and make it into something else.

You can I hope imagine, that hiring some people who spent their time undoing your work and redoing it, might offer advantage. Well, that was the project . .

Those two exceptions were Ternary logic processors, and what became the oh so very ill fated Elbrus 2000 processor. When F1 goes to Sochi, Elbrus, a pretty and epic mountain, isn’t so far away. (this is the ultimate chance to combine serious hiking, clean air, and racing, do not miss if you can afford) There may be many other exceptions, but those are distinct. Ternary logic theoretically has some benefits in AI, and the Elbrus 2K was a attempt at EPIC instruction sets, which is what INtel went for with the Itanium processor*. Both have really vital gotchyas for simple use. Anyhow, considering their limited resources, no public market, and no doubt silly directive from on high, the Ruskii Geeks were very very cool.

*getting even more geek, just briefly, their register array in the Itanium is a stack machine, the kind pioneered in Edinburgh, and a long lost outfit called Whitechapel Computer Works which was one time a market leader, bless. which allowed it to emulate the Alpha chip it was designated to replace, and pretty much anything else. Other things made that too hard. Sorry, misty eyed at the thought our fair country once had an edge in all this. However, I would hazard some of the people ended up in supplier firms to F1.

Your’e getting too technical for me John, the highlight of my “nerdiness” was learning 6502 assembler for my Oric Atmos and immediately coming across a major fundamental problem which no one could answer. (I found a bloke at the BBC who spoke 6502 but he was as mystified as me. ) Then later assembler on the Lizzie (Psion LZ)

But sticking to F1, what is amazing is the sheer volume of data from the telemetrics, what is it 15 channels at some high in the Megs speed? AND you now have to save the whole lot, every second of it.

Yeah, I imagine the data stream is very fast, and you have some major issues processing it. There is a field called “stream processing”, which is quietly talked about in finance and process engineering. You once said you’d be fascinated to see some Tier 1 trading data. Well, you can saturate a gigabit/s line with any decent market tick feed. Think multi terabytes per day. What the heck do you do with it all?

Methinks there might be a career path overlap between handling racing telemetry and finance, to be exploited. As in, younger guys could see a richer exit, established quant programmers could look to take a sabbatical in F1. I’m all for upping the intellectual stakes.

A lot of the problem, is that databases are not naturally good at ingesting all that data. Because the model is to do indexes across the relationships, and so that causes ailments. The second problem, is that people then go DIY, when instead this is a major team effort kind of problem. A related field is Complex Event Processing. Also known as the Schumi WTF Investigation Team.

My start was on a 8080 donated to my school that was doing nothing. We had a math stand in teacher, somehow laid off from ICL, and we were all trapped that summer. So we started writing out own PacMan and Asteroids games. Not polished, but in a sleepy town, that was a very cool nerd crew 🙂

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the transition to “CISC-on-the-outside, RISC-on-the-inside” happened with the Pentium Pro (a.k.a. 686), not the Pentium. Then they found it didn’t have quite the benefit they were hoping for, and had to backtrack…

But yeah, Pentkovsky existed, so maybe it was a “kill two birds with one stone” kinda thing? Paid tribute to him while also foiling the cloners.

Just my 2p worth from someone who writes “tight code to a real time processing system”, although I’ve never used QNX, either use bespoke stuff or VxWorks for my sins.

(I also used to speak 6502 a long time ago; and could still tell you most of the Z80’s clock-cycle timings and some of the opcodes from memory…)

yep, the P Pro, not the Pentium. Mea! Blimming heck, it’s not so very long . . I think NT4 was in the works then, and we were all over it.

The problem was the depth of the pipeline. Basically, awful analogy coming right up, think automatic pistol. Yeah, you can fire so many bullets a second, but recoil, overheat, all sorts throws off the aim. In a processor, you have a problem with conditional branching. What do you do with a add multiply instruction that takes more than one bits of data? Keep shoving those into a not very complex pipeline designed to just go go go (like the RISC designs which never accepted big compound instructions) and you have halt time to time. Back up. So now your super fast pipeline is all in virtual reverse, right up to user space. Imagine the pipeline like sending lots of people down to sign up for school, to many different desks. The line moves faster. Only there’s a limit to what the desks can do. Back of the line, you filled your form in wrong . .

So, this was a problem to solve, which required a lot of thinking. I am uncertain Pentkovski was even working at INtel, by the time they had this sussed. Two things happened, branch prediction got into hardware better, and the compilers started to efficiently weed out and rewrite / optimise instructions known to go cause a clog.

There’s another misconception about the clones. Some people say that INtel was required to allow AMD because either of competition rules, or because of the US military requirement for redundant suppliers. In fact, INtel was the first and AFAIK only govvy supplier to get a waiver for the “dual supplier” rule. AMD basically did some awesome Clean Room design.

Never worked with the RTOSs directly, just studied them, as pertinent to our problems. I presume you know you can run any modern Windows system in pseudo real time mode? Not for the faint hearted, I reckon . .

If it is Charlie who makes these legal U-turns, then he is arguably incompetent! If it’s not him, it must be the rules! It’s just inconceivable that the FIA’s legal procedure allows for such a ridiculous mess! This is how it goes: “”Hi Charlie, I’ve sent you a pix with my iPhone of my brand new floor, is it legal? Hi Chris, am not sure, but I think it’s legal. Maybe. I’ll ask my wife and my dog. Know what? Bring it to the next race and we can have a chat after the race. With the other guys, of course, please bring coffee & cake. One week later: Oops, sorry guys, it says under rule 19’789, under Z, last paragraph: it’s illegal. Yeah sure, you won the race, but so what? Who cares? We’re still friends, aren’t we? What you say? Sound ridiculous? Loss of credibility? No way! Who says so?”””
What is it, that makes legal procedures impossible to produce legally binding “opinions” BEFORE the race? What’s the use of asking Charlie each time for legality after finding a new trick if his “interpretation” is not binding? Can it be that no-one thought of it after so many legal scandals in F1? If Bernie is so smart, why did he not try himself t outsmart the dark horses of the FIA? Not for the sake of public opinion but for the fans!

That was an unseemly affair, but one always hopes that the leadership will not intervene and put the soldiers in difficult positions. It is easy to blame the soldiers at a later date because they should have done otherwise, but put yourself in their position and ask yourself what you would have done. A defence of mitigating circumstances is better than no job at all (or in army terms being shot for disobeying orders).

Given that Max’s powers didn’t rise to the firing squad, Charlie absolutely should have resigned in protest.

The thing is, I honestly don’t believe he would have risked his career. His current job? Certainly, but I expect any number of teams or series would have offered him lofty positions – if for no other reason than to spite Mad Max.

Everyone has a line they won’t cross. Charlie’s seems to be well outside mine, and I suspect yours. I wouldn’t have a man with his scruples working for me.

I have followed this debate with interest, but find it hard to believe that the size of that slot on the Red Bulk can add an additional 50% more down force to the rear end.
It is well known that Red Bull had trouble getting the rear of the car to work in the first couple of races, and if this slot was the magic touch to sort out that problem, then these cars is really balanced on a knife edge.

I would be really interested in knowing just how much pressure a slot of that size produces. The tyres problem in aero terms I know teams for years have been working on solution on how to use the pressure – flow coming off them or before it hits them.

I believe that it is not the airflow from the slot itself as a force but as a director, in one case attaching an airflow to the diffuser and in another directing it away from the rear wheels. Pls read the Scarbs item wich explains it in full.

Reblogged this on F1 Goggles and commented:
Giving it to us straight – Joe Saward clears the air about the Red Bull floor and the FIA’s stance on it. If you’re a serious F1 fan, you simply must follow this man’s blog https://joesaward.wordpress.com/